The international space of the Danish testing community in the interwar years

Abstract

The focus of this article is to draw attention to the presence and importance of travelling ideas, knowledge, and practices in Danish history of educational testing. The article introduces and employs a spatial methodological approach in relation to the connections between the international testing community and the emerging Danish practice of intelligence testing in the interwar years. The article represents a contribution to an investigation of the social and cultural exchange of educational ideas between the Anglo-Saxon world and Scandinavia, in general, and Denmark in particular. Moreover, the article argues for the positive gains of drawing on a spatial frame of interpretation when dealing with national educational history.

Keywords:

• spatial turn
• methodology
• educational testing
• psychological testing
• history of psychology

Notes

¹My translation.

²Ian Grosvenor, “Geographies of Risk: An Exploration of City Childhoods in Early Twentieth-century Britain,” Paedagogica Historica 45 (2009): 218.

³Ibid., 232.

⁴Popkewitz, Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

⁵Robert Cowen, “Acting Comparatively upon the Educational World: Puzzles and Possibilities,” Oxford Review of Education 32 (2006): 564.

⁶Jason Beech, “The Theme of Educational Transfer in Comparative Education: A View over Time,” Research in Comparative and International Education 1 (2006): 2.

⁷Cowen, “Acting Comparatively,” 566.

⁸Christian Hansen Tybjerg, “Om maaling af menneskelige Evner og Anlæg,” Tidsskrift for eksperimentalpædagogik (1921): 6.

⁹Meyer to the Frederiksberg school director, November 1937, in Stadsarkiv, Skolevæsenet, sag nr. 92.

¹⁰Meyer, “Børnepsykologien og dens Anvendelse,” Folkeskolen 46 (1929): 697f.

¹¹”backward” is now considered insulting, hurtful, or offensive. However, I am attempting to present an accurate rendition of history. The period treated in this article was an era in which such terms were the way that certain people, certain segments of the population were characterized.

¹²Harald Torpe, “Skolepsykologien i Danmark,” Nordisk Psykologi 1 (1949): 92f.

¹³It should be duly mentioned that the Murray Thematic Apperception Test was first published in 1935.

¹⁴ The New Era (1952): 174f.

¹⁵Kevin Brehony, “A New Education for a New Era: The Contribution of the Conferences of the New Education Fellowship to the Disciplinary Field of Education, 1921–1938,” Paedagogica Historica 40 (2004): 745.

¹⁶E. Fuchs, “Educational Sciences, Morality and Politics: International Educational Congresses in the Early Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 40 (2004).

¹⁷London Institute of Education Archive, WEF III/186/1929: Programme for the Elsinore conference.

¹⁸L. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt—Psychologist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979).

¹⁹Ibid., 323.

²⁰H. Meyer, “Om standpunktsprøver,” Vor Ungdom, (1926): 41.

²¹Thom Axelsson, Rätt elev i rätt klass. Skola, begåvning och styrning 1910-1950 (Linköping: University of Linköping, 2007), 51f.

²²Christian Lundahl, Viljan att veta vad andra vet (Stockholm: Arbetslivsinstitutet, 2006), 33, 205.

²³Spearman, Psychology Down the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1937); Spearman, The Abilities of Man (London: Macmillan, 1927).

²⁴Meyer, “Om standpunktsprøver,” 42.